


Little Red Knife

by wintergrey



Series: The Blood-Dimmed Tide [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood, Brainwashing, Death, Gen, Loyalty, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-24
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 09:32:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1683518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In the midst of killing Vdova sees herself reflected in Deva's mask: a forged, black thing like a knife trailing red ribbons, ribbons of men's blood and her own red, red hair. Deva is gold, spun gold like a princess in a folk tale and she kills like a beast—joyfully, without memory or regret."</p><p>The Widow program maintains at least two active agents in the modern era, and they are used for a multitude of tasks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Red Knife

Things fall apart.

Vdova watches. There is blood in the street, blood in the gutter, pink brain and white bone on black paint. There is weeping, there is always weeping, always a woman to weep. The world is full of widows. Vdova watches light reflecting from a sniper sight, one small flaw in an otherwise perfect plan glinting like a star. Afterward, there is silence. The radio says nothing for a long time.

Deva hands her a set of eyes that turn the world black and green. Heat flares—she sees a first and then a second signature walking behind layered walls and distance. She knows the forms intimately, sees them written on her eyelids from the inside in her dreams. They meet and part, meet and part, and meet for a long time.

When they part again, one flung from the other as if by a great force, the radio finally speaks of going home.

"They know," Deva murmurs.

"They don't know." A flick of her finger silences Deva, the trigger pulled on a gun inside Deva's head, muzzle pressed hard against her memories. "You don't know."

"I don't know," Deva says obediently, and—just then—she doesn't. Vdova feels nothing but a vague envy. A mother cares for her daughter in different ways. Unlike the others, she has lost the luxury of knowing nothing. A witness that knows nothing is of no use to those that judge.

The propellers of a black Ansat strum the air far afield across a half-city left standing between battles. That is not the bird that will fly them home. They have other business here besides watching. With her own eyes, Vdova catches a glimpse of two figures moving, but only because she knows what she's looking for, she has looked for it so many times. The setting sun could be glittering off of any piece of twisted steel but she knows the flare of a single ray of light touching that hand as it reaches back, reaches back for that second hand reaching ahead.

They know, but they will forget. They know, and she is afraid. She cannot know it, cannot forget it, buries it under the blood in the gutter and the weeping of the woman. She has kills to make, more bodies under which to hide what she cannot know.

Deva follows Vdova, a shadow after a shadow, over rubble walls and down the canyons between shattered highrises.

There is a kind of forgetting that is almost as good as the absence of knowing. It comes when her body moves, when she hunts, when she kills. In the midst of killing Vdova sees herself reflected in Deva's mask: a forged, black thing like a knife trailing red ribbons, ribbons of men's blood and her own red, red hair.

Deva is gold, spun gold like a princess in a folk tale and she kills like a beast—joyfully, without memory or regret. Vdova came first, Deva came second, and so they go this way, Vdova leading and Deva dancing behind. They are not mother and daughter but it is Vdova who remembers and that, in its way, makes her mother of them all. She remembers all their kills and—if they ever failed—she would remember their failures.

Bullets spin past Vdova, twisting their way into the concrete walls of this kill box between wreckage and rubble. She steps between the shots lightly like the ballerina they say she once was and pirouettes so that her heel, her delicate heel wrapped in steel and leather, shatters a soldier's jaw and wrenches his head around until his neck snaps.

Deva is humming under her breath, an Imperial march that Vdova knows by heart. Vdova floats like the notes, takes the gun from the hands of a man trying to kill her, shoots him, shoots his commander, shoots the woman wearing a red cross arm band behind them—the bullet pierces her pleading, raised hand and then her heart. Quick, merciful. Vdova regrets nothing.

"Alla marcia," Deva says brightly from where she stands atop a supply truck. A limp corpse hangs from her hand, its entrails draped around her feet. It is her favourite tempo. She drops the corpse and turns over twice in the air before she lands flawlessly on the cracked street in front of Vdova.

"Vse koncheno," Vdova tells her. It's over.

"For now." Deva flips up onto the gap-toothed rim of what was once a hospital. "Do they have it?" The supply truck is full of food and water—neither of them have eaten or drunk in days—but she ignores it. Neither of them are thirsty yet, nor hungry.

"I don't know." Vdova begins the task of searching. It is such a small thing they want to find, a small thing that holds so much. If she is hungry for anything it is to find their target and retrieve it. She switches eyes to the scanner that can see small secrets. The world is reformed into void and density, the carnage becomes even more abstract.

Bodies are reduced to skeletons now, skeletons draped in veils of flesh and skin, as though Vdova's own eyes are X-ray machines. She remembers a time when she would have wielded a knife instead, flaying skin and laying open flesh to the bone to discover what was hidden. The world has turned and times have changed—the others know nothing of it, they wake anew and whatever is simply is.

She feels the change and wonders day by day when they, too, will be obsolete. When will they no longer be needed to wield the knife or fire the gun? She watches for that day the way she watches for all dangers, listens when the scientists and commandants think she sleeps, watches the shifting expressions on the faces of the men who are rewarded with her in their beds.

"Never," they croon, trying to lull her back to the sleep of trust. "Mother Russia will always need you, kotik, my kitten." But she is neither a child nor a kitten anymore, she is nearly a lifetime past childhood, and all children must grow as all sleepers must wake. When they gave her Deva, when they set her to watch the others, there was no more sleeping, not even to please them and to save herself.

Vdova watches patterns, watches for changes, watches for that which does not belong, and it serves her well. She catches sight of something no bigger than a grain of rice deep in the unhinged jaw of a body that was broken over Deva's knee. For this, she needs a knife. For some things, only the oldest of tools will suffice. Knowing that gives her hope. Her blade passes through flesh to the bone with a whisper she can feel in her palm.

"Vdova?" Deva's voice is not afraid, never afraid, but curious. "What is this?"

Vdova pushes up her goggles to see. Deva is crouched above her, eyes on something on her own palm. Something glitters, something dances, like the sparkles in Vdova's eyes when she is dying. She is moving before she has a word for what is happening.

"Deva, run!" She grabs Deva by the wrist and they move in time, two horses in the same harness.

A trap. It is a trap. The word resolves in her mind as the world explodes behind them.

Vdova tastes blood, loses her grip on Deva in the blast of an airstrike. The air is full of concrete and steel, slabs bigger than coffins hang suspended in the stilled time of her reactions. She leaps skyward, climbing them like stairs even as they fall until she launches herself free, shrouded in the veil of smoke and pulverized stone rising from the crater where she once stood. When she descends, she lets gravity carry her down, rolls into the small-dark of a crevasse, and waits to breathe.

Her lungs are full of blood, her belly under her crossed arms is a shifting sack of ruined things, her heart falters and forgets its rhythm. Vdova knows her own death, knows she can last beyond it if she is only patient. Patience, she tells the panic that claws her spine and ribs from the inside like a cat drowning. Wait.

Mother Russia will save her. The gifts of the Motherland will make her whole again. Even as she is dying she is coming back to life one cell at a time. The dark creeps in and sleep looms, the final sleep in which she will forget and take all she knows with her. Then the tide turns, she feels it the way she remembers a false sun breaking a horizon with an explosion of light so bright it nearly left her blind, and she bursts back into the world.

"Deva, Deva," she murmurs, just loud enough for ears like theirs to hear. She pulls her goggles down again, switches to the eyes that will see heat. "Speak."

"Here, Vdova." Deva is calm, somewhere to her left. "Did you get it?"

"I..." Vdova unfolds her bloody, clenched fist and searches the creases of her palm with the fingertips of her other hand. She doesn't remember taking it but there it is, smaller than a grain of rice, nestled in the curve of her life line. She removes it, tucks it away into the vial that waits for it between her breasts. "Yes. Come. No radio."

Vdova leads, Deva follows, north by northwest, through the gutted belly of the hospital and out the other side. Vdova pushes her goggles up to see with her own eyes. The sun is gone, the broken glass of an old chapel grates under their boots.

A light flickers and, at first, Vdova thinks it it is a candle. She forgets that no one is left to light one until the small red circle sweeps the floor and runs up Deva's leg, over the curve of her waist, and... they dance. Vdova spins her through three steps of a waltz, so that her own body bears that point of light. It touches her slowly like a lover, not a killer—the hollow between her breasts left bare when she put the chip away, the curve of her throat, her parted lips, her brow.

The shot that comes is hers. Only a handgun but powerful enough. Something small and glass shatters at a distance. This time it is Deva's hand on her wrist, Deva leading the dance. Three more steps on and Vdova remembers herself, changes direction, and draws Deva after her into the night.


End file.
